02-24-2003, 08:47 PM
Hi,
I agree with a lot of your analysis. A few additions and comments in no particular order:
I still think that every repair should reduce the maximum durability of an item. Eventually, all items should wear out and need to be replaced. That would have a number of good effects, such as making the economy viable and making less than uber items meaningful. It would also make finding decent but not great items more fun since you'd probably get some good from them. And it would also make "dressing for the occasion" more of a challenge. After all, would you want to uses your best weapon on run of the mill monsters or save it for big bosses? However, I can understand why people would object to this since so many focus on the items rather than the characters or the quests.
If items wear out, then I'd agree that bosses should drop better items than they do and that items should have modifiers that are more in line with the base item's level. However, if more frequent drops of better items is implemented and items don't wear out, then the "everybody has uber everything" syndrome becomes worse. This in turn means that somehow the monsters need to be jacked up to keep the challenge. But jacked up monsters means that everybody would then *need* the uber items and some people would want uber^2 items. It's a never ending spiral. There are two ways to keep the number of uber items in b.net down. One is to make it almost impossible to find one and the other is to make their lifetimes finite (i.e., if they are used, they will wear out). The "almost impossible to find" is what Buzzard implemented, but it is a mistake. No matter how small the rate, with enough people playing for enough time, each item will eventually saturate.
The drops of not just bosses, but all monsters need to be revisited. First, monsters should drop things that are more in line with their type. Archers should drop bows, mages wands, etc. Of course any monster could drop potions, but why would *any* monster have a scroll of town portal? Second, the probability distribution for drops should be more peaked. A high level monster could still drop low level items but should have a much higher probability of dropping a higher level item. Also, the "below par" items should just be dropped from the game. We can assume that all monster have some gear or other, most not worth even picking up. To clutter the ground with junk is a waste of time, effort and code. Boss drops should not necessarily be "useful", but they should at least be worth taking back to town for the cash.
Your complaint about the monster AI is valid. However, before they fix that, they need to address the path finding routines. Watching a monster do the shimmy is fun, once or twice, but gets old after a while. If the monsters can't even figure out how to get to you, the question of how they'll attack you is pretty much moot.
Shops! YES. I had a bowazon that did about a week's worth of clears of the Bloody Foothills before she found a bow to imbue. All base items should be available at the stores. Maybe not all at once, although with the tab scheme, there is no reason why not. However, I disagree with the changing inventory once per game. Not that I don't think that that is a good idea, but that I think that it would cause a rash of new games being created on b.net, making a bad situation worse. Now, if it could be tied to the character so that things are only replaced when they are bought or every xxx experience points (representing some passage of time allowing new "supplies" to come in), then that would be nice. Also, while I enjoy the gambling aspect of the game, I think it is pretty poorly tied into the story. Cain IDs everything for you and it doesn't seem to take any effort on his part. So, for story consistency, why not just take him to the gambling merchant and have him look over the wares -- poof, no more gamble. With someone in every town that can ID stuff, how gambling can be incorporated in a reasonable way just doesn't seem clear to me. Besides, I am strongly of the opinion that the best stuff should *only* come from adventuring. What you can buy in town should be about average and no better. After all, this is a dungeon crawl, not a trading game (or is it?)
On levels, I too would like a bigger game. After all, if the game is good, more is better (in DS, by the end of the game I was going "Oh, no. Not *another* level). However, more is a lot more work for the creators, more ideas that they need to implement, etc. More is, in short, more expensive. So, while I would have liked more areas, I'm pretty satisfied with what they did. What I cannot understand is why only *three* levels??? Think about it. If instead of tweaking the three difficulties by hand, the people at Buzzard had thought about it some more and come up with a difficulty level formula, then they could have made it open ended (or effectively so, just an unsigned int would give 256 levels). And same could be done with the character level. If you have a reasonable upper limit on the items, then *everybody* could get through the basic game, satisfying those who want to zoom through and say "I finished D 2" and it would still be open ended above so that there would always be a point where the game became a test of skill regardless of the items.
BUT: all this has been talked about over and over since D 2 came out. Before each patch, all these ideas and much more have been been bandied about. If anyone at Buzzard cares, they already know all this. So. to paraphrase Portos (IIRC) at the end of The Four Musketeers: "For D2, this is too much and for D3 it is too little." ;)
--Pete
I agree with a lot of your analysis. A few additions and comments in no particular order:
I still think that every repair should reduce the maximum durability of an item. Eventually, all items should wear out and need to be replaced. That would have a number of good effects, such as making the economy viable and making less than uber items meaningful. It would also make finding decent but not great items more fun since you'd probably get some good from them. And it would also make "dressing for the occasion" more of a challenge. After all, would you want to uses your best weapon on run of the mill monsters or save it for big bosses? However, I can understand why people would object to this since so many focus on the items rather than the characters or the quests.
If items wear out, then I'd agree that bosses should drop better items than they do and that items should have modifiers that are more in line with the base item's level. However, if more frequent drops of better items is implemented and items don't wear out, then the "everybody has uber everything" syndrome becomes worse. This in turn means that somehow the monsters need to be jacked up to keep the challenge. But jacked up monsters means that everybody would then *need* the uber items and some people would want uber^2 items. It's a never ending spiral. There are two ways to keep the number of uber items in b.net down. One is to make it almost impossible to find one and the other is to make their lifetimes finite (i.e., if they are used, they will wear out). The "almost impossible to find" is what Buzzard implemented, but it is a mistake. No matter how small the rate, with enough people playing for enough time, each item will eventually saturate.
The drops of not just bosses, but all monsters need to be revisited. First, monsters should drop things that are more in line with their type. Archers should drop bows, mages wands, etc. Of course any monster could drop potions, but why would *any* monster have a scroll of town portal? Second, the probability distribution for drops should be more peaked. A high level monster could still drop low level items but should have a much higher probability of dropping a higher level item. Also, the "below par" items should just be dropped from the game. We can assume that all monster have some gear or other, most not worth even picking up. To clutter the ground with junk is a waste of time, effort and code. Boss drops should not necessarily be "useful", but they should at least be worth taking back to town for the cash.
Your complaint about the monster AI is valid. However, before they fix that, they need to address the path finding routines. Watching a monster do the shimmy is fun, once or twice, but gets old after a while. If the monsters can't even figure out how to get to you, the question of how they'll attack you is pretty much moot.
Shops! YES. I had a bowazon that did about a week's worth of clears of the Bloody Foothills before she found a bow to imbue. All base items should be available at the stores. Maybe not all at once, although with the tab scheme, there is no reason why not. However, I disagree with the changing inventory once per game. Not that I don't think that that is a good idea, but that I think that it would cause a rash of new games being created on b.net, making a bad situation worse. Now, if it could be tied to the character so that things are only replaced when they are bought or every xxx experience points (representing some passage of time allowing new "supplies" to come in), then that would be nice. Also, while I enjoy the gambling aspect of the game, I think it is pretty poorly tied into the story. Cain IDs everything for you and it doesn't seem to take any effort on his part. So, for story consistency, why not just take him to the gambling merchant and have him look over the wares -- poof, no more gamble. With someone in every town that can ID stuff, how gambling can be incorporated in a reasonable way just doesn't seem clear to me. Besides, I am strongly of the opinion that the best stuff should *only* come from adventuring. What you can buy in town should be about average and no better. After all, this is a dungeon crawl, not a trading game (or is it?)
On levels, I too would like a bigger game. After all, if the game is good, more is better (in DS, by the end of the game I was going "Oh, no. Not *another* level). However, more is a lot more work for the creators, more ideas that they need to implement, etc. More is, in short, more expensive. So, while I would have liked more areas, I'm pretty satisfied with what they did. What I cannot understand is why only *three* levels??? Think about it. If instead of tweaking the three difficulties by hand, the people at Buzzard had thought about it some more and come up with a difficulty level formula, then they could have made it open ended (or effectively so, just an unsigned int would give 256 levels). And same could be done with the character level. If you have a reasonable upper limit on the items, then *everybody* could get through the basic game, satisfying those who want to zoom through and say "I finished D 2" and it would still be open ended above so that there would always be a point where the game became a test of skill regardless of the items.
BUT: all this has been talked about over and over since D 2 came out. Before each patch, all these ideas and much more have been been bandied about. If anyone at Buzzard cares, they already know all this. So. to paraphrase Portos (IIRC) at the end of The Four Musketeers: "For D2, this is too much and for D3 it is too little." ;)
--Pete
How big was the aquarium in Noah's ark?